What is the size of the Icelandic population?
The population of Iceland today is about 285,000 or so, and about 85,000 people have participated in our studies, after signing informed consent, have given us blood so as we can isolate DNA from it. And, one of the big advantages of working in a nation like the Icelandic nation is that the size is so small that we can work with everyone who has a particular disease in Iceland, but it is sufficiently large to give us enough cases of basically all diseases that have prevalence that is greater than .2%. Is this targeted disease approach unique? I don’t think that our approach is in its very nature so different from others. There aren’t all that many ways in which you can do these things. But one of the things that we realized relatively early on is the necessity of finding ways to get around the fact that when you start a study of the genetics of our common diseases, there’s no way in which you can predict how much information you need to be able to map a gene before you start your work.
